The Government Won on Financial Reform

The financial system is more regulated than
ever, but also no safer.

Updated Sept. 22, 2013 9:00 p.m. ET

'Your No. 1 client is the government." So former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack told current CEO James Gorman in a recent phone call, according to a September 10 story in the Journal. He's exactly right, which more or less sums up how American finance has evolved in the five years since the 2008 financial crisis. Far and away the biggest winner is the government.

This isn't the conventional view in media and politics, where the spin is that Wall Street has triumphed. This is politically convenient because it maintains...